Tumblr’s New App Supports iPhone-Exclusive 3D Touch And Live Photos

Not happy with simply hosting tons and tons photos, videos and GIFs, Tumblr is also now hosting Live Photos, making it the first third-party iOS app to gain this feature. Today, the company says that all users will now have access to this feature, which introduces a way to communicate directly with others on the service, in a private, chat-like interface. The Live Photo bit is super interesting because Tumblr is a place where GIFs and animated images tend to get shared and re-shared at pretty rapid rates. The addition makes sense as Tumblr users are generally connecting with each other to talk about their shared interests or content on the site, as opposed to other social networks where you’re generally chatting and networking with friends.

That’s how you spot ‘em.” Once you post a Live Photo, your followers will be able to deep-press on them to see them “come alive,” as long as they’re running iOS 9 and have installed the updated Tumblr app. Being able to share a post privately with another Tumblr user and optionally comment on what you think, then, is something that many messaging users will likely want to do. On the app’s dashboard, deep pressing on a name or avatar will surface a Peek into that Tumblr blog, and swiping upwards will give you the option to share the Tumblr, get notifications whenever something new is posted, or send a message to that Tumblr user. At the time of its November launch, Tumblr said that the larger messaging rollout would take several weeks to complete and it seems the company was right on schedule. This goes along with the other updates Tumblr for iOS got today, which includes general availability for messaging and the ability to message posts to your friends.

Before today, the only way you could use the messaging service (if you weren’t already invited to try it) was to receive a message from someone who had chat enabled. Though messaging seems like a small feature release for the blogging site, it’s actually a notable development that could transform how people use Tumblr. The addition gives the site a real-time component that could help it better engage users as they shift more of their activity to mobile, where messaging apps dominate. On mobile devices, push notifications about new chats could help to bring about increased interactions with Tumblr’s product, as well as longer session times. And the feature itself could be improved over time to offer a feature set that’s more competitive with other chat platforms – like Messenger, for example – by introducing rich media sharing, and other activities.